Fantasy Animation

This book examines the relationship that exists between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Animation has played a key role in defining our collective expectations and experiences of fantasy cinema, just as fantasy storytelling has often served as inspiration for our most popular animated film and television. Bringing together contributions from world-renowned film and media scholars, Fantasy/Animation considers the various historical, theoretical, and cultural ramifications of the animated fantasy film. This collection provides a range of chapters on subjects including Disney, Pixar, and Studio Ghibli, filmmakers such as Ralph Bakshi and James Cameron, and on film and television franchises such as Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon (2010–) and HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–).

This book examines the relationship that exists between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Animation has played a key role in defining our collective expectations and experiences of fantasy cinema, just as fantasy storytelling has often served as inspiration for our most popular animated film and television. Bringing together contributions from world-renowned film and media scholars, Fantasy/Animation considers the various historical, theoretical, and cultural ramifications of the animated fantasy film. This collection provides a range of chapters on subjects including Disney, Pixar, and Studio Ghibli, filmmakers such as Ralph Bakshi and James Cameron, and on film and television franchises such as Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon (2010–) and HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–).

Hand-Made Television explores the ongoing enchantment of many of the much-loved stop-frame children's television programmes of 1960s and 1970s Britain. The first academic work to analyse programmes such as Pogles' Wood (1966), Clangers (1969), Bagpuss (1974) (Smallfilms) and Gordon Murray's Camberwick Green (1966), Trumpton (1967) and Chigley (1969), the book connects these series to their social and historical contexts while providing in-depth analyses of their themes and hand-made aesthetics. Hand-Made Television shows that the appeal of these programmes is rooted not only in their participatory address and evocation of a pastoral English past, but also in the connection of their stop-frame aesthetics to the actions of childhood play. This book makes a significant contribution to both Animation Studies and Television Studies; combining scholarly rigour with an accessible style, it is suitable for scholars as well as fans of these iconic British children's programmes.

Animated Documentary, the first book to be published on this fascinating topic, considers how animation is used as a representational strategy in nonfiction film and television and explores the ways animation expands the range and depth of what documentary can show us about the world. On behalf of the Society for Animation Studies(SAS), the Chair of the Jury announced the book as the winner of the delayed 2015 SAS McLaren-Lambart Award with the following words: 'Animated Documentary is a vital addition to both animation scholarship and film studies scholarship more broadly, expertly achieving the tricky challenge of synthesising these two scholarly traditions to provide a compelling and brilliantly coherent account of the animated documentary form. At the heart of Roe’s book is the conviction that animated documentary “has the capacity to represent temporally, geographically, and psychologically distal aspects of life beyond the reach of live action” (p. 22). As a representational strategy, Roe details how animated documentary can be seen to adopt techniques of “mimetic substitution, non-mimetic substitution and evocation” in response to the limitations of live action material (p. 26). Animated Documentary will without doubt become an essential resource for many years to come for anyone interested in the intersection of animation and documentary.'

Animated Performance shows how a character can seemingly 'come to life' when their movements reflect the emotional or narrative context of their situation: when they start to 'perform'. The many tips, examples and exercises from a veteran of the animation industry will help readers harness the flexibility of animation to portray a limitless variety of characters and ensure that no two performances are ever alike. More than 300 color illustrations demonstrate how animal and fantasy characters can live and move without losing their non-human qualities and interviews with Disney animators Art Babbitt, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Ellen Woodbury make this a unique insight into bringing a whole world of characters to life. New to the second edition: A new chapter with introductory exercises to introduce beginner animators to the the world of animated acting; dozens of new assignments and examples focusing on designing and animating fantasy and animal characters.

In September 1960 a television show emerged from the mists of prehistoric time to take its place as the mother of all animated sitcoms. The Flintstones spawned dozens of imitations, just as, two decades later, The Simpsons sparked a renaissance of primetime animation. This fascinating book explores the landscape of television animation, from Bedrock to Springfield, and beyond. The contributors critically examine the key issues and questions, including: How do we explain the animation explosion of the 1960s? Why did it take nearly twenty years following the cancellation of The Flintstones for animation to find its feet again as primetime fare? In addressing these questions, as well as many others, essays examine the relation between earlier, made-for-cinema animated production (such as the Warner Looney Toons shorts) and television-based animation; the role of animation in the economies of broadcast and cable television; and the links between animation production and brand image. Contributors also examine specific programmes like The Powerpuff Girls, Daria, Ren and Stimpy and South Park from the perspective of fans, exploring fan cybercommunities, investigating how ideas of 'class' and 'taste' apply to recent TV animation, and addressing themes such as irony, alienation, and representations of the family.

The films from Pixar Animation Studios belong to the most popular family films today. From Monsters Inc to Toy Story and Wall-E, the animated characters take on human qualities that demand more than just cultural analysis. What animates the human subject according to Pixar? What are the ideological implications? Pixar with Lacan has the double aim of analyzing the Pixar films and exemplifying important psychoanalytic concepts (the voice, the gaze, partial object, the Other, the object a, the primal father, the name-of-the-father, symbolic castration, the imaginary/ the real/ the symbolic, desire and drive, the four discourses, masculine/feminine), examining the ideological implications of the images of human existence given in the films.

The early twenty-first century has seen an explosion of animation. Cartoon characters are everywhere—in cinema, television, and video games and as brand logos. There are new technological objects that seem to have lives of their own—from Facebook algorithms that suggest products for us to buy to robots that respond to human facial expressions. The ubiquity of animation is not a trivial side-effect of the development of digital technologies and the globalization of media markets. Rather, it points to a paradigm shift. In the last century, performance became a key term in academic and popular discourse: The idea that we construct identities through our gestures and speech proved extremely useful for thinking about many aspects of social life. The present volume proposes an anthropological concept of animation as a contrast and complement to performance: The idea that we construct social others by projecting parts of ourselves out into the world might prove useful for thinking about such topics as climate crisis, corporate branding, and social media. Like performance, animation can serve as a platform for comparisons of different cultures and historical eras. Teri Silvio presents an anthropology of animation through a detailed ethnographic account of how characters, objects, and abstract concepts are invested with lives, personalities, and powers—and how people interact with them—in contemporary Taiwan. The practices analyzed include the worship of wooden statues of Buddhist and Daoist deities and the recent craze for cute vinyl versions of these deities, as well as a wildly popular video fantasy series performed by puppets. She reveals that animation is, like performance, a concept that works differently in different contexts, and that animation practices are deeply informed by local traditions of thinking about the relationships between body and soul, spiritual power and the material world. The case of Taiwan, where Chinese traditions merge with Japanese and American popular culture, uncovers alternatives to seeing animation as either an expression of animism or as “playing God.” Looking at the contemporary world through the lens of animation will help us rethink relationships between global and local, identity and otherness, human and non-human.